Xiaomi’s Pocophone F1 smartphone goes up for pre-order in the US

Xiaomi’s sub-brand Pocophone launched its first “affordable flagship” smartphone Pocophone F1 in August with an aggressive pricing of just $300. After the phone went on sale in India, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Europe, it’s now available for pre-order in the United States.

The phone’s listing appeared on B&H Photo Video’s website, with a price tag of $370 for the 6GB RAM model carrying 64GB of internal storage while the 128GB storage model is priced at $399.99. Unfortunately, the global version of the Pocophone F1 is incompatible with the CDMA networks of Verizon and Sprint and also lacks the LTE bands to operate on AT&T and T-Mobile’s 4G networks.

The Pocophone F1 flaunts a 6.18-inch Full HD+ IPS LCD display which offers 2246 x 1080 pixels screen resolution and 18.7:9 aspect ratio. The display supports up to 500-nits brightness and a high contrast ratio of 1500:1. For protection from minor scratches, there’s a layer of Corning Gorilla Glass on top.

Under the hood, the handset is powered by Qualcomm‘s flagship Snapdragon 845 processor and comes with LiquidCool technology. The company says that it decided to place a copper heat sink above the chipset which helps in dissipating the heat generated by it, allowing the phone to transfer heat at a faster rate of 300 percent.

Coming to the camera department, the phone comes with a 12-megapixel Sony IMX363 sensor with a massive pixel size of 1.4micron coupled with a 5-megapixel secondary sensor on the back panel. It is equipped with features like Dual Pixel Autofocus, real-time AI photography and dual-LED flash. On the front side, there’s a 20-megapixel selfie camera powered with AI for capturing enhanced selfie shots.

It runs on a modified MIUI, based on MIUI 9.6 with the new POCO Launcher on top. It includes a lot of customizations such as the inclusion of an app drawer that easily categories apps for easier access and it also carries support for icon packs. The customized MIUI, which is based on Android 8.1 Oreo has been optimized to launch popular apps quickly, smoothly run apps in the foreground and supports fluid gesture-based navigation.

The device comes with an IR scanner that enables Face Unlock feature. The Pocophone F1 is powered by a 4,000mAh battery that also carries support for Quick Charge 3.0 fast charging technology. According to the company, it offers 8 hours of gaming, around 6 hours of Full-HD video playback, nearly 31 hours of talk time and standby time of 15 days.